Friday, April 16, 2010

Weird abortion tales

The patient was my peer--beautiful, intelligent, on birth control. She had gotten her period throughout the pregnancy and had a hidden, violent history of sexual abuse from her vocally anti-choice father, but she chose to live at home to influence and protect her young brothers.

So this beautiful and intelligent young woman -- we know she's beautiful and intelligent because she's on birth control -- chose to remain in an abusive situation, and to keep her brothers in that abusive situation.

So she's already making choices that are self-destructive and destructive for her younger siblings. First order of business with this woman should have been getting her and her siblings some help with the domestic violence situation. But never mind all that! Abortion fixes everything!

I was accompanying her through her surgical process for pregnancy termination at 24 weeks, and she felt like she was pregnant with an alien, even a monster.

The belief that you are pregnant with something non-human -- an alien or a monster -- is psychotic. This woman needed psychiatric care.

So we have the second failure to address the patient's real needs. No help with the domestic violence, no help with the mental health issues. Abortion fixes everything!

She slept on her side so her boyfriend couldn’t see as she waited for one more paycheck.

How can sleeping on your side prevent somebody from noticing that you're six months pregnant? And how come her boyfriend is living at home with her, the abused siblings, and the abusive father? How FUBAR can one situation be? This woman needed a lot of intervention. None of her problems is anything an abortion will fix.

During her surgery, she cried-out the entire time, just sobbed.

It doesn't seem like she wanted the abortion all that much. It sounds like she was doing it out of desperation, out of feeling trapped. And she certainly comes across as a very demoralized young woman. How is this helping her?

She wept poignantly with the tender guidance of our immaculate doctor and well-versed doula, and I stood frozen and heart-broken with her pain to the side.

WTF? Yeah, I get that the doctor at this clinic is nice and clean, not like the filthy drunks you find at this clinic's competitors. (What other medical facility needs to gratuitously assert that their doctors are CLEAN, because otherwise you'll assume they smell like hobos?) And he offers "tender guidance" for you to cry by. Um... not sure what to make of that. A doula is a childbirth assistant, so she's not very well-versed if she's attending abortions. And I'm not clear on how helping a woman to force herself through something so agonizing is seen as virtuous.

Two weeks later she returned to fulfill her IOU, and she had a black eye.

Yeah, the abortion just cleared up that domestic violence situation, didn't it?

Had this woman gone to a prolife center, such as our local Gabriel Project here in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, they'd have addressed her real issues, starting with the domestic violence and the mental health issues. Then they'd have gone to work on decision making skills. Practical nuts and bolts skills that would enable this woman to move out on her own -- perhaps taking her siblings with her to remove them from the abuse. They'd have been working with her on a weekly basis for improving her overall situation, with more intensive intervention for crises. They'd have helped her find housing, helped her pull together security deposits, helped her to get furniture and household stuff. They'd have helped her with financial management. They'd have hooked her up with whatever she needed to address the many problems in her life. They'd have done a hell of a lot more useful stuff than taking her money, killing her baby while she wept piteously, and sending her home to get punched out.

And the wretched excuse for care that our abortion worker provided to this desperate young woman was all just a prequel to the point the abortion worker is trying to make. I'll cover that in another post.

(Can anybody isolate a clip for me from "The Bell Boy" with Buster Keaton? I can't get the image out of my mind of when Buster is scrubbing his fingernails with the scrub brush from the floor-cleaning bucket. That'd be a lovely illustration of what, evidently, you'd expect from an abortion clinic if you weren't reassured in advance that their doctors were clean.)

19 comments:

You know, that story depressed me, because I didn't see any realistic possibility for a happy ending. The lovely scenario you described, of her moving out, taking her siblings out of the abusive home, and forming a new little family unit -- nice. But I could more easily imagine the baby being born, and left to die in a dumpster.

And I think the part about the woman being "beautiful, intelligent and on birth control" was not to establish correlation that one must be using the latter to be the former two, but rather to establish her as a person as a "peer," to whom the original poster related, which was the point of her disturbing post.

(For the record, I'm butt-ugly, intelligent, and use birth control myself. :) )

NEWSFLASH: Abortion gets rid of your unwanted pregnancy. It does not cure your other problems in life.

If you're a compulsive gambler, abortion will not cure you of that. If you're a bad driver, getting an abortion will not make you drive better. If you're fat, abortion will not make you thin. If you're a domestic-violence victim, abortion will not fix your problem (although abortion may prevent it from getting worse--it's easier to leave someone if you don't have a child with him.)

I don't understand why Christina writes posts expressing surprise, and dismay, about this. It's a fact of life! Abortion takes care of your unwanted pregnancy, not the other problems in your life.

You think this DV victim would be better off if Christina had been able to force her to grow her pregnancy??? If yes, you're nuts.

News flash: being raped by your male parent can make you pregnant; spending too much on the ponys does not.It's against the law for those in authority to not report child abuse; it is not against the law for them not to report poker games.

She'd be better off with people who would help her to actually address her problems. But the clinic workers despise and denigrate the people who actually do that -- who actually take the time with the woman to address the domestic violence, the sexual abuse, the mental health issues, and whatever else she has going on. They congratulate themselves for having "helped" her when the just took her money and sent her back into all the problems that put her on the abortion table to begin with.

She'll be back for another exciting (for the clinic workers) episode, bringing the abortion worker "puzzling and profound joy" along with her paycheck.

I guess that's how abortion workers can see abortion as a victory. They get the drama played out for their entertainment, and instead of having to buy a ticket they're actually paid to be there.

Lil, yes they're supposed to report child abuse. But I'm WAY past expecting abortion clinics to do that. One of the big beefs I have with the opposition to parental involvement laws is that the abortion lobbyists protest that this will endanger the teens that they're doing secret abortions on because the teens are being abused at home. They flat out ADMIT that they don't report the abuse, they just take the girl's money, do the abortion, and send her back for more abuse.

Lil,Yes, there are mandatory reporting laws for the suspected or known abuse of minors (under the age of 18), as well as laws which requires reporting suspected or known abuse of disabled individuals and the elderly. However, Planned Parenthood staff has been caught on both audio tape and video tape numerous times violating these laws and clinic workers such as those who blog often openly admit they defy these laws. The problem is, these clinic staff feel it's their duty to protect these woman's privacy (HIPPA), despite the law requiring mandatory reporting. However, the privacy law makes an exception for suspected or known cases of abuse when reporting said abuse is mandatory in the state the clinic is in, and anyways, these clinic workers aren't doing these women any favors by giving them abortions and a pack of birth control in secret and sending them right on back to their abuser, without taking any proactive steps towards getting them help (such as appropriate referrals to domestic violence agencies, women's advocates, or by making a necessary phone call to child protective services).

So why aren't the abortion clinics sued - if there is evidence they know of abuse and they don't follow the law and report it - I'm sure a good case could be made. This will set a precadent that they have to follow?

Sometimes they are sued. Generally the parents of the underage girl can get a settlement if they can prove she was INJURED. I haven't seen a successful lawsuit based purely on the situation of simply being returned to her abuser for more abuse.

It's like priests, who respect the confidentiality of the confession EVEN IF doing so makes them accessories after the fact to a crime. In the priest's view, the ethical requirements of his position places him above the reporting-law.

I would like to see more priests get prosecuted for these violations, but the fact is, they'd go on committing them anyway.

The law takes precedence above doctor/therapist confidentiality. if you don't have that then I really don't know - it becomes like a church that is capable of hiding horrific child abuse. Its ridiculous!

I bet you'd find if you could learn what people hide that failure or refusal to report legally reportable situations is very common in medicine generally. My experience is most docs are very unenthusiastic about complying with reporting requirements. And I'm not talking mainly about docs who do abortions. I'm thinking mostly of ER docs, and addiction-medicine specialists, but I bet it's true everywhere in medicine except maybe pathology.

Docs are very sensitive to situations in which patients might be afraid to tell them what they need to know. If your patient has say a drug addiction which he conceals from you but which causes a problem--say his addiction-drug messes with his blood pressure or it interacts with a drug you're prescribing to help get him ready for a special procedure or surgery or whatever--that's extremely frustrating. You tell yourself it's not your fault when the patient conceals stuff, but even so you feel angry at whatever caused him to conceal the problem. Just about every doc who has trained in USA has had some kind of exposure to something like this, some event that happened to onesself or to a friend during training which one remembers with horror, some disaster because of a patient being afraid to tell the doc what the doc needed to know. And everyone knows that every reportability law makes patients more likely to conceal stuff.

Unlike the injunction against abortion and assisted suicide, confidentiality is still part of the doctors' professional oath (which used to be the Hippocratic Oath) and docs tend to be very defensive about confidentiality. The goal pretty much everywhere is to comply with the law in the most minimal possible way, report just barely enough to avoid getting in trouble.

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